A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how Hillary Clinton was gradually converting her admirers into sociopaths, making her a particularly toxic ethics corrupter. I haven’t written here as much about ethics corrupters as I should have, but Hillary will give me many opportunities to rectify that situation. To quote the Ethics Alarms glossary,
“An ethics corrupter is someone, usually a celebrity, a public official or an accomplished and successful individual, who behaves unethically and forces those who admire him or her, or what they have achieved, to defend indefensible conduct as a matter of loyalty or cognitive dissonance. As a result, the defenders warp their own values, using rationalizations to excuse or justify conduct they once correctly understood was wrong…”
Now Reason has seen the light:
…the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton’s repeated claims, contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” So how much do Democrats value basic transparency, accountability, and honesty in their presidential candidates? Not bloody much, if you go by the handy polls over at RealClearPolitics. The six national polls taken this January and February, before the email scandal first broke, averaged out to a whopping 43 percentage-point lead for Hillary Clinton. How about the next six, in March and April? Plus 50. The 11 polls in May and June, when Berniementum first started sweeping the country, came in at +48, and the most recent five in July stand at +41.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that, contrary to Clinton’s statements, not only were some of the emails classified, they were classified at the time they were sent, which would mean yet another defensive explanation (about retroactive classifications) has bitten the dust. Excerpt:
In a letter to members of Congress on Thursday, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email contains material from the intelligence community that should have been considered “secret” at the time it was sent, the second-highest level of classification. A copy of the letter to Congress was provided to The Wall Street Journal by a spokeswoman for the Inspector General.
The four emails in question “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” said Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. The inspector general reviewed just a small sample totaling about 40 emails in Mrs. Clinton’s inbox—meaning that many more in the trove of more than 30,000 may contain potentially secret or top-secret information. […]
“None of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings, but some included IC-derived classified information and should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough in the letter to Congress.
It’s worth rehashing, as the WSJ does, the lie Hillary Clinton told reporters in March:
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material…I’m certainly aware of the classified requirements and did not send classified material.”
Corruption matters. Ethics corruption doesn’t recede when the corrupter leaves the scene: ethical values, once abandoned, may never return. Hillary Clinton supporters, a group which includes Democrats, progressives and feminists, need to seriously consider this, and whether it is worth abandoning vital ethical priorities like honesty, candor, integrity, civic duty and avoiding conflicts of interest in order to elect a leader of dubious qualifications and character like Hillary Clinton. Of course it isn’t. Our leaders determine our society’s direction; corrupt leaders can only drag a society down into cynicism, selfishness and coarseness. The most brazen of Clinton’s surrogates don’t even seem to disagree, and apparently are comfortable with the degradation, as illustrated by this statement, also quoted by Reason, from long-time Clinton minion Paul Begala in March:
“Voters do not give a shit. They do not even give a fart… Find me one persuadable voter who agrees with HRC on the issues but will vote against her because she has a non-archival-compliant email system and I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window and say it smells like roses.”
Ugly, isn’t it? Smug, crass, cynical. That’s how the corrupt think and talk, and that’s the fate waiting for those who continue to shrug off the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s persistent disregard for standards of right and wrong. Can a democracy survive when a majority of the public has jettisoned basic ethics to that extent?
We may be about to find out.
Ethics Alarms 
Did Begala really, really say that? Amazing. Just absolutely amazing.
Of course, this is all old news, Jack.
Hahahahahahaha.
Wait, which Hahahahahahaha is this? The Joker’s evil Hahahahahahaha? The Shadow’s knowing Hahahahahahaha? An H.P. Lovecraft Hahahahahahaha signalling a descent into madness when hope is gone? Or Hillary’s Hahahahahahaha?
Just, a “these Clintonistas are pathetic and extremely predictable” laugh.
Predictable in their utter contempt for every decent standard of civil society, Bill. It’s little wonder that they’ve gathered political cretins like Begala, Carville and others (some deceased!) into their pack of putridity. Talking about Paul Begala in respect to the Clintons is similar to a comparison between Valerie Jarrett and the Obamas. If you can judge the worth of someone by their friends, you can judge it ever more closely from that of their chief enforcers.
I can do this! One of my best friends, a young, liberal women has lost her trust in Hillary Clinton specifically because of the email scandal. She understands that using government email is so easy to do, and that using a private account MUST mean that Hillary was covering something up!
Ms. Begala was proven perfectly wrong!
You need to parse that statement as if it was spoken by Bill or Hillary. Your friend obviously disagrees with Clinton on the issue of federal records, and therefore doesn’t count… 😉
You are correct! She believes in preserving the public record; she thus disagrees with Hillary on the “issue” of email compliance, and thus does not count… Sigh :p
The elite class of a civilization determines its character. The character traits of the masses are irrelevant. A civilization can survive one poor regime, but a succession of bad rulers over a generation casts the civilization’s viability into doubt.
She is still no match for her husband when it comes to ethics corruption. I had no idea sex with an intern is acceptable behavior for a President of the United States before Clinton. Neither did most of Clinton’s supporters, which is the definition of ethics corruption.
Particularly the feminists, so called. Hard to believe. Bizarre. Eight more years of Bill and Hill is terrifying.
It will be around year five when the media finally has the
courageeconomic incentive to report the first First Husband sex scandal….You surely didn’t think Bill Clinton was the first US President to have sex with a young intern or employee?
So what? You’re not going to try the everybody does it defense, now, are you? He was the first one caught. If Kennedy, for example, had been caught, he would have been run out of town on a rail. That might be my least favorite Clinton rationalization…no, “it’s his personal life” is the worst, then that one.
I was simply surprised by Dan Abrams : “I had no idea sex with an intern is acceptable behavior for a President of the United States before Clinton”. My understanding is that there was plenty of sex with interns or equivalents pre Clinton; those close to the Presidents knew about it; and to the extent that few of the offending Presidents were openly attacked or criticised for such behaviour, that such behaviour was widely “accepted” That is not to say that such behaviour isn’t wrong and unacceptable now, or to defend Bill Clinton.
So what’s wrong with the statement, “I had no idea sex with an intern is acceptable behavior for a President of the United States before Clinton”? It wasn’t acceptable conduct before or after Clinton.
Semantics. It (the conduct) may not ever be “acceptable’ to you or Dan or me. But the statement “I had no idea (the conduct) Is acceptable …” implies it might or might not have been “accepted”. Clearly it was accepted to a large degree pre Clinton. More interestingly is the extent to which ethics, ‘right and wrongness’, is ‘crowd sourced’, rather than based on some timeless holy writ.
No, it was NOT accepted. It was hidden. The public and the culture did not accept it. If it was accepted, it would not have been hidden. It would have been open.
Holy writs imply moral codes. It was unacceptable in that respect, but also because it was regarded as unseemly, beneath the dignity of the office, something Abe and George would never so, un-Presidential, unprofessional, and an abuse of power and position. And so it was. No holy writ was or is required.
“If Kennedy, for example, had been caught, he would have been run out of town on a rail.”
Doubtful. Mary Jo Kopechne died and all that happened was that Teddy didn’t run for president.
Not a good comp. Teddy wasn’t President, and that cover up went just fine. Old Joe paid off the family, nobody investigated the full circumstances, and Ted skated, but it still stopped him from being President. And Massachusetts isn’t the US.
I’m inclined to believe that if the small crime (“small” for comparison’s sake) could be white-washed, the larger one could be washed whiter. It’s a matter of enlarging the circle of cognitive dissonance forward to protect belief in the righteousness of the whole Kennedy (or Clinton) clan or in the martyrdom of a minority of millions via a single Ferguson felon.
Cognitive dissonance itself is a lazy, careless mode of thought that stops at the first convenient resting place and declares the journey done. The larger the ethical disparity the more the person in the CD state withdraws from active consideration of the subject and progresses to catatonia.
In other words, I think the voter turnout this next election may be meager.
Adultery is never acceptable.
Yes, you’re right about ‘ethical corruption’. For balance I hope you will comment also on the corruption of the ‘right’ as per Timothy Egan’s opinion in the NYT.
“The adults patrolling the playpen of Republican politics are appalled that we’ve become a society where it’s O.K. to make fun of veterans, to call anyone who isn’t rich a loser, to cast an entire group of newly arrived strivers as rapists and shiftless criminals.”
a. You have omitted the distinction between illegal and legal immigration. Recognizing that distinction is part of the price of admission to being taken seriously on the issue; and,
b. You have to compare corrupt apples to corrupt apples. Approximately 17 million Democrats have cast real votes for Hillary for President, while essentially zero Republicans have done so for The Donald.
At the moment, no one has cast any votes for ANYBODY! No primaries, for either party, have happened yet.
Cheap shot, nothing more. Trump pulls the GOP wackos, which, for now, is about 20%. Favoring Bernie Sanders is just as wacky, just less embarrassing.
Egan’s NYT opinion does not read to me as a ‘cheap shot’ at Trump or the GOP. He is with you on ‘ethical corruption’. Those in the GOP who stood aside when Kerry was smeared (Swift Boats) in 2004 because it was politicaly convenient, were parties to ‘ethical corruption’. Trump’s criticism of McCain follows. As ye sow therefore shall ye reap ….. “Ethical corruption” should be confronted as a non partisan issue. Egan’s opinion would have been more effective if he had included for instance the unfair smearing of Romney over his Bain Capital links. Likewise I wish you would broaden your crusade beyond criticism of the Clintons.
The comparison of the Swiftboating to McCain is ridiculous. First of all, it was Kerry’s fellow officers who attacked him, not Republicans politicians They were wrong and unfair (and I wrote they were wrong and unfair) but the GOP had no obligation to get involved. Kerry lit that fuse, making his fame by slandering fellow soldiers before Congress and daring to salute when he got the nomination. Nor did the swiftboat captains say that all decorated veterans were frauds, just John Kerry. Trump attacked all prisoners of war with his statement.
Did you read the comments section in the Times article?
Okay. I give up. What’s with the old albums or scrapbooks that replaced the month’s iconic faces? (Or did I miss the explanation?)